GamesMaster

» see gamesmaster.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The show came first and it was on Channel 4, which is a British terrestrial broadcaster and therefore never a thing that happened in Ankara. GamesMaster went on air in 1992 as the first British television show about video games, and the magazine was launched in January 1993 to sit on the shelf next to it. Everything I know about either of them I read later and secondhand, like weather reports from another country.

Future plc published the magazine and hired Jim Douglas to edit it, poaching him from EMAP, where he had been lined up to edit the official Nintendo title instead. Issue one sold 219,492 copies by Future's own count, which is a number that stops meaning anything until you set it beside what came later. Edge, the serious one, the design award one, was its stablemate at the same publisher, and as late as 2012 GamesMaster was outselling it.

In October 2018 Future announced that GamesMaster and its partner title GamesTM were no longer profitable parts of the business and that the issues going on sale on 1 November would be the final editions of both. Robin Valentine was editing it at the end. The staff were redeployed inside the company, which is how a publisher phrases what happens to a magazine's people when the magazine stops.

~ the record ~

~ the television part ~

Jane Hewland had come out of London Weekend Television and set up her own production company. She noticed how much her son cared about video games, decided there was a show in it, and was rejected enough times that she went and filmed his friends explaining why they loved games as proof that the audience existed. Channel 4 bought it and gave her ten thousand pounds an episode for ten episodes, which was not a vote of confidence so much as a cheap experiment.

Dominik Diamond hosted six of the seven original series. Sir Patrick Moore, the astronomer, played the GamesMaster himself, appearing only in pre-recorded inserts, which is a casting decision nobody has ever fully explained and nobody who saw it has forgotten. Most of the running time was challenges: ordinary players and celebrities attempting a specific feat in a specific game, with a Golden Joystick trophy for whoever managed it.

The reviews were handled by borrowing other people's staff. To give the show authority with the games press and to avoid hiring reviewers, the production used journalists from EMAP's magazines, so EMAP titles like Mean Machines and C&VG were effectively supplying the opinions on screen. Series three replaced Diamond with Dexter Fletcher, which the audience hated. The show ended in 1998 and came back in 2021 on E4 and YouTube with Sir Trevor McDonald in the chair.

~ outliving the show ~

A tie-in magazine normally dies with the thing it was tied to. Channel 4 canceled the show in 1998 and the magazine then ran another twenty years on a name whose origin most of its later readers would have had to look up. By the end it was a general multiformat monthly that happened to be called GamesMaster, carrying a brand from a Channel 4 Friday night into the PlayStation 4 era.

Typing the domain today takes you to an author page on GamesRadar, where the magazine's byline is filed as a contributor to a website run by the same publisher. The back issues are on the Internet Archive.

~ the last November ~

GamesTM went on the same day, after sixteen years. That left Edge as the last long-running multiformat games magazine in Britain, with the licensed console titles and PC Gamer still running under the same roof at Future. The consolidation that had spent two decades collecting British games magazines finished by canceling two of its own.

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